How to Plan Projects (Without a Kanban Board)
- Prem Sundaram
- Jun 25
- 5 min read
It's World Cup soccer (ahem. Football!) at the moment, and all this talk about goals got me thinking it would a good time to remind our audience about projects, goals, milestones and tasks!
I had six open projects last week and couldn't tell you what any of them needed from me by Friday.
Not the work — I knew the work. I meant the why. The scope. The thing I'd promised myself when I started each one.
That's a planning failure, not a discipline failure. And it's the failure the standard Kanban board can't catch.
If that sounds like you, the fix isn't another app. It's four index cards, in a specific order, before you open your project tool.
Why most project planning fails before it starts
Most personal projects die in the first week. Not because the work was too hard — because the why was too vague.
The corporate project management playbook teaches four stages: initiation, planning, execution, closing. The reason it's taught in corporations is the same reason it works for personal projects: skipping initiation is the #1 reason people abandon projects halfway through.
Initiation isn't "pick a name." Initiation is four specific things, written down before you touch a task list:
• Goal — what's the outcome, in one sentence?
• Scope — what's in, what's explicitly out?
• Deliverables — what's the concrete thing you can point to when you're done?
• Success criteria — how will you know it worked, before you start?
If you can't write these four sentences in under ten minutes, you don't have a project yet. You have a wish.
The one-page project brief that replaces the doc
A project brief doesn't have to be a Notion database. A project brief is one index card with four quadrants. That's it.
Top-left: the goal. Top-right: what's in scope. Bottom-left: the deliverables. Bottom-right: what "done" looks like.
Then put it on a new canvas first, before any milestone or task card. The reason: every task you write later has to pass the test of "does this move the goal on the brief?" If it doesn't, it's not a task — it's a distraction wearing a task costume.
This is the part the Kanban board skips. Kanban boards show you what's in progress. They don't tell you why any of it matters. The brief does. Keep it visible — pin it to the top of your canvas — and let every other card be measured against it.
Milestones, dependencies, and the critical path — on cards
Once the brief is set, the planning stage has three jobs:
1. Break the goal into milestones — checkpoints, not tasks. "Outline complete" is a milestone. "Write chapter 3" is a task. Add Milestones and Tasks to your Canvas
2. Map dependencies — which task blocks which other task? Note cards let you draw arrows. A Kanban column hides this.
3. Find the critical path — the chain of milestones where any delay pushes the whole project back. These are the cards that get the most attention.
NoteDex cards work well here because each milestone is its own card with its own due date, its own dependencies (linked cards), and its own notes. You don't need a Gantt chart. You need a wall of cards with arrows. You can map these onto a NoteDex Canvas. Your Canvas will have a mix of Milestones and Tasks (Tasks being the actions needed to reach a particular Milestone). Together these Tasks strung together reach a Goal.
Time estimates: the part nobody wants to do
Estimating time is the part every project manager hates because estimates are wrong. That's not a failure of the method — that's the method. The skill is being honest about how wrong.
Two rules:
• Use your past, not someone else's. Your past tasks — how long they actually took, not how long you thought they'd take — are the only honest dataset. Someone else's "3 hours" is not your 3 hours.
• Add buffers on the risky stuff. Tasks that depend on other people, tasks you've never done before, tasks where you'll be learning the tool as you go. Add 50% buffer to anything in those categories. The buffer isn't pessimism — it's realism.
On a canvas, write the estimate on the card itself. When the task finishes, write the actual time. After three projects you'll have your own real numbers, and you'll stop believing the optimistic estimates that ship in project management templates.
Kanban boards: useful, but not for this
Kanban boards are great for execution. They're terrible for planning. The visual model is "things moving across columns" — it shows momentum, not reasoning.
So don't start with the Kanban. Start with the brief (one card). Then the milestones (a handful of cards, in order). Then the tasks (to reach milestones). Then, and only then, open NoteDex in Kanban view (or put these tasks into your Kanban to-do app) to move the tasks across columns.
The Kanban is the execution surface. The Canvas is the planning surface. NoteDex gives you both — and the planning half is where most apps stop helping.
The four-card test before you start
Before you start any project — personal, work, side, anything — do this:
1. Write the goal on one card.
2. Write the scope (what's in, what's out) on another.
3. Write the deliverables on a third.
4. Write the success criteria on a fourth.
Pin them at the top of your canvas. Now every milestone and task card you write gets measured against them. If a task doesn't serve one of those four cards, it doesn't belong on the canvas.
That's the whole project planning method. An initiation cards with four quadrants, a canvas with milestones, tasks, lines to show dependencies between milestones, honest time estimates, and a Kanban only for execution. No other app required.
Create your initiation card. Open NoteDex, create a 2x2 table (or use an existing card template and modify it).
Open a new Canvas. Add this initiation card to it. Alternatively just create 4 cards on the Canvas.
Drop additional cards to layout milestones and connect them with lines.
Add tasks needed to reach each milestone.
See visually how this plan ends in reaching the Goal!
Here is an example layout so you can see what we mean - We created a NoteDex Card and inserted it into a Canvas for the project brief. Then we used the Canvas to plan out some milestones and tasks - in this case we used tasks 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 to mean the tasks needed to reach Milestone 1 etc. and we show a dependency between Milestones 2 and 3, meaning Milestone 3 is dependent on Milestone 2.
Get started your next project the right way today with NoteDex!
